Tag: forums

Hello all members of the *Brainz community, I have got something in store just for you!

Some people may have noted talks and whispers about a grand and glorious move to use Discourse for various discussions related to MusicBrainz and all other MetaBrainz projects. The intention of it is to replace and unify both the now-dead mailing lists (R.I.P.) and our current forums. Guess what? The day has come at last!

The MetaBrainz Community Discourse can be found at https://community.metabrainz.org/ and is our new home for all discussions about MusicBrainz, BookBrainz, AcousticBrainz, and whatever other kind of *Brainz you want to talk about.

One of its major features is that it does not require yet another user (like the current forums, our ticket tracker, the wiki, …). When you press “Sign Up” or “Log In” it will ask you to authenticate with MusicBrainz to access some basic information. Once given permission, it will direct you back to the Discourse site and you’re logged in. (You can revoke the permission at a later point, should you need to.) No more having a dozen username/password combinations, just to participate in the community!

The site does still have some rough edges though, and various things are likely to get tweaked over the coming weeks, but today being the 1st day of (N. hemisphere) spring, I thought we should enjoy this season of “rebirth, rejuvenation, renewal, resurrection and regrowth” with this new baby of the MetaBrainz community.

A couple of people have already gone and started some discussions there, but feel free to go there yourself and start your own discussion. If you have started a discussion on the current/old forums, now is also a good time to restart/continue/move that discussion to the Discourse site as the forums will be put into read-only mode any day (posts will not be moved over).

There are already two themes emerging from the feedback on the various blog posts (especially yesterdays’s post):

We have too many forms of communication: Blog, forum, mailing lists, Jira, edit notes and IRC. Some of these serve very specific purposes, such as the blog and jira, our ticket system. Others like the forum, mailing lists and IRC overlap quite a bit. In this area it seems that we should be able to consolidate a little, but people seem to be quite invested in their favorite form of communication. Forum users tend to dislike mailing lists and vice versa. People either hate or love IRC, there isn’t much middle ground.

Lack of single sign on: To participate in most of these forms of communication the user needs to create a new, distinct account from their main MusicBrainz account. This hinders users from participating in more communication forms, which fractures our community.

How do we improve this then? I think we should focus our discussion on mailing lists, forums, IRC and in-site communication (MBS-1801, again), since they are more generic and overlap each other somewhat.

I see some possible ways of doing this, so let me think out loud for a minute:

Drop mailing lists and forums and use a “cloud hosted” instance of Discourse. Discourse is open source, supports single sign on, and looks like it could easily replace forums and mailing lists. I doubt this would be sufficient to replace IRC, but overall very promising.

Drop mailing lists, forums, IRC and implement a really kick ass communication/chat/edit note system in MusicBrainz itself. Layer’s offerings look like they might make this not too hard and are not too expensive. Our own system would allow the greatest level of control and integration and needs no new sign-on. However, it may also be the most amount of work.

(Regardless of what we decided to do, worry not, we would keep historical archives of whatever communications form we decides to drop.)

I’d also briefly considered using Slack, but since it isn’t open source and not geared towards open source, this doesn’t quite feel right. What other interesting tools are out there? What other ways do you see that we can consolidate our forms of communication?